This promo post is the first part of “Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps.” Originally part of an undivided volume—specifically Volume Two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book series—this promo post now belongs to a large-but-redundant sample series called “Brace for Impact“ (2024); i.e., that went on to become its own completed module in Volume Two: the Poetry Module, aka Volume Two, part one. The module was primarily inspired by Harmony Corrupted and divides into over thirteen posts, whose collective chapters/subchapters compile one half of the larger total volume; i.e., Volume Two has three modules—one bigger module for part one (re: the Poetry Module), and two slightly smaller modules (the Monster Modules) for part two—for which the volume halves are roughly equal in size (subject to change).

Update, 5/4/2024: I’m starting a similar book sample series for Volume Two, part two: “Searching for Secrets“ (2024)!

Update, 5/1/2024: Volume Two, part one (the Poetry Module) is out! I wrote a preface for the module along with its debut announcement. Give that a look; then, go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the full module (which will contain additions/corrections these posts will not have)!

Click here to see “Brace for Impact’s” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically ally shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).

(artist: Lera PI)

“Teaching (the Caterpillar and the Wasp),” part two: Solving Riddles; or, Following in Medusa’s Footsteps

When Perseus slew the Medusa he did not—as commonly thought—put an end to her reign or destroy her terrifying powers. Afterwards, Athena embossed her shield with the Medusa’s head. The writhing snakes, with their fanged gaping mouths, and the Medusa’s own enormous teeth and lolling tongue were on full view. Athena’s aim was simply to strike terror into the hearts of men as well as reminding them of their symbolic debt to the imaginary castrating mother. And no doubt she knew what she was doing. After all, Athena was the great Mother-Goddess of the ancient world and according to ancient legend—the daughter of Metis, the goddess of wisdom, also known as the Medusa.

 —Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine (1993)

Picking up from where “Angry Mothers” left off…

Due to repeated expansions, “Teaching” part two has been divided into multiple subdivisions (“Following in Medusa’s Footsteps”) for an easier reading experience:

• “Spilling Tea” (this post): A quick vibe check before we meet the girl of the hour.
• “Meeting Medusa” (this post): Articulates how we can encounter “Medusa” in everyday life—a touch of the extraordinary lurking in those we meet as normally policed or controlled by the state. This classically falls under a male/female binary, which I will try to hyphenate based on my own experiences and expertise (scholarly synthesis).
• Postscript (this post): Gives an extension to the monstrous-feminine that considers the spatial relationship of the monstrous-feminine; i.e., the spaces and actors inside them as going beyond the Western kayfabe of Amazons vs Medusa: the kawaii/kowai dichotomy of J-horror in relation to Metroidvania as something I have studied extensively.
• Post-postscript/Further Reading (this post): Supplies further reading and gives a fun little anecdote about people who don’t like being given further reading.
• “Teaching between Media and our Bodies, and a Bit of Coaching“: Shifts focus, expanding on the monstrous-feminine as something to consider (and teach) through a) the space between multiple forms of media and our bodies, and b) is something to materialize and grasp at through coaching behaviors (of which I shall demonstrate).
• “Conflict, Mothers-in Conflict, and Liberation“: Concludes the chapter by concentrating on themes of conflict that double as praxial struggles insofar as language hermeneutically functions; i.e., always in conflict in a variety of ways. I consider that variety unto itself, then regard it in relation to mothers (and the monstrous-feminine) as trapped, fighting for liberation.

“Following in Medusa’s Footsteps”: Spilling Tea; or, a Small Vibe Check

Blood was running into the tea pot,
Then I heard them laugh:
“A bit of this in a cup of tea, is what it
Takes to set them free!”

—King Diamond; “Tea,” on King Diamond’s Them (1988)

Before we “meet Medusa,” let’s have a quick vibe check, just to cover some ground. So sit with me, girls. Let’s spill some tea!

(artist: Eugène Emmanuel Amaury Duval)

Monster movies (and similar media) are commonly “creature features,” meaning the creature is the main attraction (or the castle, or the creature as castle-like or vice versa, but I digress): us; our hormones, our minds, our bodies. E.g., I’m something of a Medusa myself—AMAB, and when I’m on estrogen, it changes me in a variety of ways. For one, I don’t wake up with erections (an inversion of Jekyll’s magic potion, insofar as trans men tend to experience expanded sexual appetites while they’re on T) unless I stop E (“a return to boyhood”), but I do experience sore nipples and an increase in sexual stimulation/orgasmic dimension (morphological/psychological qualities that would expand if progesterone were thrown into the mix: weight gain, aka “love weight,” or “fuck, I have to buy new clothes!”). However, I also don’t get vaginismus. But I am a firm believer in sex and force as something to camp through the monstrous-feminine during campy (counterterrorist) psychosexual operations while being mindful of state operatives; i.e., professional, deputized or vigilante (stochastic) dragon slayers keeping power in, and flowing towards, state hands (the state using fascist copaganda/nostalgic killers to fight Communism for over a hundred years, if you factor in the Beerhall Putsch, American Nazi bund and KKK, etc; e.g., The Birth of a Nation [1915] and cowboys/territorial “speed killers” and gun freaks* [duelists per the cult of machismo, weapons and death, from Eco’s 14 Points] in American movies; Bobby Fischer in American chess; and tech/trader bros in Silicon Valley and Wall Street into America’s Second Gilded Age, etc). Keeping them in mind, we Medusas become a mad-scientist-level, genderqueer/postcolonial act—of shapeshifting defiance that, like the village kid from Black Dynamite (2009), says “Can’t kill me” over and over to our dumb American heroes, who, ever the killer himbos, can only hear, “Why, Black Dynamite, why?”

*Small rant about firearms, war language and BDSM: When it comes to guns, I’m generally more involved in thinking about the things shot at versus the hunters doing the shooting. Furthermore, the American flag as heraldry always gives me pause, precisely because capital’s regular genocides rely on “moving merchandise”; i.e., selling guns at home and guns and bombs abroad to past, present and future war criminals brutalizing the oppressed for profit (“killing is a business, and business is good!”). But there’s still a gradient; re: our aforementioned “speed killers” versus someone like Kentucky Ballistics firing a giant hand cannon (or somewhat novelty weapon) clearly meant for education, venue-type sporting events and entertainment purposes (the crowd loves a big spectacle). That being said, “sporting weapons” imbricate with pure weapons of war used by stochastic terrorists. I’m not for American gun culture, period, and realize your garden-variety shotgun is just as likely a tool for homicidal white boys mad at the world, or chasing glory while treating other humans like the most dangerous game. Except they’re essentially shooting fish in a barrel—synonymizing sex and violence while penetrating others (sometimes their peers, but usually the underclass) with phallic lead rounds, not blades.

Neither is acceptable, of course, and settler colonialism is a cowardly enterprise regardless of the implements used; but from a culture of overtly macho men that act tough, they come across as especially craven and pathetic hiding behind all this firepower and empty bravo. But if I had to choose the greater of two evils, it’s the quick, accurate tools I’m more worried about—the combat rifles, the AR-15s wielded by obscurantist reactionaries playing monomyth while defending “Rome” from “invading barbarians”—and Kentucky Ballistics’ work is clearly comedic/the lesser of two evils; you’re not going to see someone do a school shooting with a Loony-Toons-style 50-pound cannon calling itself a rifle (Kentucky Ballistics’ “The 950 JDJ FAT MAC,” 2024).

All this being said, the language of war and objectification can yield destructive analogs in harmless forms, during sex-positive BDSM “playing war” in bed to spice things up(which limits the “damage,” with or without quotes, to just the couple and [sometimes] other participants); i.e., dirty talk framing the male and female ends as warlike tools-for-the-job (which again, pit male force against female/monstrous-feminine targets of nature as game to hunt): swords and scabbards, arrows and targets, or ramrods and cannon barrels, but also toys of war whose poetic language imitates harmful forms, but also our body parts (e.g., super soakers); or abject ones we won’t really discuss at all, but which I feel I should at least mention, such as toilets and plungers, or …jawas and Sarlacc pits(?). The sky’s the limit, really—i.e., whatever everyone’s on board with, provided no one gets attacked and injured or killed (“no harm, no foul”). Having fun is all well and good, but safety remains paramount. So remember your safe words and steer clear of choking, knife play or anything involving harder prolonged impact, electricity or fire(!) unless you or yours have training or experience as a professional sadist. Vet that shit and work within a community whose dungeon you know and trust.

(artist: Andy Warhol)

As such, Medusa is something of a “pop art” chaos dragon, one whose visual inkblot means different things to different people as something to react differently to; i.e., emulating things like size difference per morphological realities present in a male-to-intersex-to-female gradient, insofar as the human species tends to exhibit variations depending on where you exist on said gradient; e.g., male persons tending to be bigger than female persons (I refuse to say “male” or “female” as a noun) even though a true binary doesn’t actually exist and instead must be enforced through a eugenic tendency of phenotypic qualities that suit state needs: the creation of sexual difference, of the monstrous mother as someone to sacrifice for patriarchal individuation built around profit. Contrary to Cartesian thought (white Anglo-American men and their subordinates), bodies and minds aren’t discrete or biologically essential; i.e., they aren’t writ in stone, but can change (to a wider degree) before puberty, and (to a lesser degree) after it; e.g., if my 37-year-old ass can learn and change (who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?), then so can other workers, so can the state.

The ritual is less part actual and invented, and instead actual-invented clarified gibberish; e.g., Magma’s pithy combo of French and “zeuhl” per Zëss: Le Jour du Néant (2019) as suitably absurd and poignant simultaneously—as hard hitting as Holst’s “Bringer of War” (1914), as wild as Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring passage, “Glorification of the Chosen One” (1913), or as deliciously dark as Modest Mussorgsky’s signature tone poem, “A Night on Bald Mountain” (1867), or King Diamond’s “Black Horsemen” over a century later (1987). Up against such odds as Capitalism, and listening to such immortal music inside it, I feel unafraid of death, imagining instead the Numinous (divine) presence of life everlasting. I begin to spin and dance, losing track of space and time; i.e., Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality” (1807); e.g., entrusted into my care, I become unafraid of my mother’s eventual death, because she will live on in me and me in my work as something that survives us both: a great black fortress of girthy gentle love, a fatal portrait/cradle of death whose gloomy atmosphere whispers hellish delights, Castlevania-style (with touches of Cryochamber)—mixed with sweet terrors! “Death is only the beginning, and we shall haunt you!”

To join us there in that special in-between membrane, you need only close your eyes and search within yourself for that dark mad place: where the world of the living and the land of the dead become one-in-the-same—a Hell-on-Earth as your joyous wellspring, a world without end! We’ll be waiting, lovelies, greeting you with open arms:

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:

And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.

Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys

Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;

Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet

Clear of the grave (source: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” 1845).

The key to liberation, then, is dark (Gothic, Satanic) poetry as something that queer people regularly lean towards in order to describe their daily lives under capital—to find the words in things around them, often from one’s childhood nostalgia as “fatal,” murderous: opportunities to mutate; to embrace the weird as dark, sexy and fun; oxymoronic, medieval, paradoxical; mad, etc (Zeuhl found out I liked Can, the band, and spread their legs lickety-split). Binging on monster chow, you are what you eat as much in regards to food for thought as good for growing boys’ and girls’ bodies; so when the circus comes to town—Dracula swooping in to love you and leave you before flapping away like a bat out of Hell—let him in. Ignore that preachy part of you normally saying “no” and heed that which says “yes, yes, yes!” (echoes of Joyce’s Ulysses, 1920). Feast or famine, indulge in the terrible junk food, the excessive cummy goodness as something to make amongst yourselves (an anti-work sentiment: idle hands are the devil’s workshop; i.e., a mad scientist; e.g., Anqmorphic’s “Herbert West Being Questionable and Fruity for Almost 10 Minutes Straight,” 2021). We fags tend to get it because the devil’s playground is where we live, baby. Context matters; irony matters.

(artist: Black Absinthe)

Or in the words of Black Absinthe’s On Earth or In Hell (2024):

“Rise up! Make love! Do everything above!”

I eat puss[a]y!

I eat ass!

I drink liquor!

I smoke grass!” (“Dead Queen“).

Such a campy redistribution of fun moves notably pleasurable activities like sex, drugs and rock ‘n all (and freedom of expression) away from the Puritanically holier-than-thou’s usual ghost of the counterfeit and towards the rightfully (and good-faith) queer folk they abject, ipso facto. These ephemeral sentiments are not new, then, but made new time and time again to tempt the proverbial kiddies with; i.e., those whose de facto education the Man Box demonizes as “groomers,” to which Ashley Gavin, channeling her inner Pazuzu, apes her mockeries (to a room of adults, mind you):

What’d they think I was gonna do? Right, like how gay do you think I am? That I’m just gonna bust out, on stage, at the PG show? And be like, “Alright, listen up, kids!” [drags on imaginary cigarette] “How old are you guys, eight? Nine? Alright, so some of you little boys, yer gonna wanna ram a cock down yer fockin’ throat! And some of you girls, yer gonna wanna bury yer face in pussayyyyyyyyy!” [does best Gene Simmons impression] “And some of you sick fucks, yer gonna wanna do both! Now you go run and tell Mommy and Daddy that you heard it from the dyke first!” (re: ” Live in Chicago,” 2023; timestamp: 12:00).

Laughter is often described as “the best medicine.” Ours is delivered by vacillating throbbers engorged with “clown power” (e.g., Gary Oldman’s ’90s Dracula or Killer Klowns from Outer Space, 1988): the patron saints of lost causes laughing maniacally during triage while addressing the grievous wounds of the unpaying poor that take a legion of cuckoos to combat—not for profit, but simply to heal while we make our rounds, calming others down. “First do no harm” becomes “hurt, not harm.” More or less! (Still better than the shark-like, superficial charm of Robert Patrick’s liquid-metal policeman phoning in: “To care and protect,” “to serve and protect,” or some equally-false-and-swapped-out slogan to pacify the public with).

Communism, then, becomes possible as a genderqueer intimation felt in monstrous-feminine forms: a “terrifying” vigilante clown-car horn (e.g., Sweet Tooth’s killer ice cream truck) to beep and raise the alarm of nearing state shift by “painting it black” (camp versus Batman’s coffin-shaped cop car—i.e., “Bat” canonically synonymous with “fash” [“Batmobile” = “fashmobile”] to strike fear into “criminals” [any victim of the state] performed by an imaginary billionaire useful to actual billionaires during state decay as projected onto “Gotham” or some such location; e.g., the Bounty Hunter from Darkest Dungeon 2 [2021] not needing money [he takes “candles” as payment] while playing the BDSM Destroyer role, his fetish gear a costume/avatar for cis-het men to delight in wearing: “There is no man behind the hunter’s mask, only a terrible thought”). There’s something altogether different about being a clown on purpose versus by accident, and for what that purpose (the masked agent) serves when its invoked; i.e., with or without violence, music (at times literally breaking out into random bloody musical numbers; e.g., Caleb from Blood [1997] singing “Over the Rainbow” [1939] while decapitating zombies with a pitchfork), or theatre, etc, as campy or canonical: for workers or the state.

Furthermore, though, humans tend to poetically convey alternatives in monstrous-feminine (monomorphic) ways; i.e., the reversal of size difference and reproductive power—with giant female entities (the Archaic Mother, in psychological models) both massive and sexually dominant (“phallic”), often to a cannibalistic degree. This might sound odd and thoroughly impossible regarding literal beings that “do not exist in nature,” but do exist in a half-real, poetic sense: as a ludo-Gothic BDSM extension of the human condition for anyone abused by the patriarchal status quo and its operatives (e.g., Ripley or Samus, but also Jadis—more on that, as we go). The more we experiment, the more we see things on both sides of the equation in ways we wouldn’t under natural assignment (the exception being intersex people to varying degrees); in turn, this can change how we think, thus express ourselves/respond to past expressions that survive into the present space and time.

Like Alien, Medusa concerns the strictly animal side of the human psyche triggered by stress (that being said, non-human animals tend to have much stronger fight-or-flight mechanisms, thus respond more reliably and immediately to uncanny scenarios than humans do). She’s classically die-hard and revengeful against rapacious patriarchal authorities, except we want to learn from her to liberate workers and nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., through the pest (another Freudian slip) revenge we can achieve: happiness and success, which demands harnessing our ability to terrify patriarchal forces to achieve equality for all.

To that’s, let’s go meet the girl herself, the Medusa, and follow in her large comely footsteps (or boobs; big boobs = big nuts)!

(artist: Angel Witch)

“Following in Medusa’s Footsteps”: Meeting Medusa

This paradoxical authenticity is something I can vouch for in my own life. Despite Cee obviously being a cis-het teenage boy navigating the monomyth inside his own house as hellish, I had a very similar experience myself while still inside the closet. In a galaxy not so far, far away… a past friend and sex worker called Cuwu (who the book has mentioned repeatedly by now) used me for their own stupid, selfish needs after Jadis kicked me to the curb. Like a vampire hypnotizing their prey, Cuwu’s courtship happened in ways I didn’t completely agree to. All the same, they made my wildest dreams come true (source).

—Persephone van der Waard, Sex Positivity, Volume One (2024)

Our second subdivision to “Teaching” part two considers learning from mothers, no matter how monstrous they seem (or the past they represent); i.e., as something to meet. I want to consider such rendezvous relative to language as a whole, then give more bodily and socialized (romantic, erotic) anecdotes that inform my opinions. To that, “other” is monstrous-feminine on a linguo-material level; e.g., hysteria, mania, Mothra, chlamydia—ailments and embodiments of them are generally given feminine genders, and Medusa is framed as the disease; i.e., nature as sick, needing to be “cured.” The patriarchal idea is unwarranted penetration, of course—of taming something they biologically essentialize and mark, but also celebrate for being “ripe,” thus ready-for-harvest.

Except, any melon-haver beyond a certain size will tell you the first thing that big tits are good for is back pain, followed immediately by unwanted attention (from lusty cis-het men or jealous cis-het women[1]). The same idea applies to any part of the female body as either “too big” (“non-white,” in settler-colonial terms), or simply visible (“her tits were there”) regardless of size, thus difficult to dress in anything that fits because a visible externalized woman under capital is always out-of-place: a damsel and a threat. As such, the owner of a given body can’t escape its size being eyed hungrily by Capitalism’s horny-angry toddlers; we must critique both sides[2] to prevent universal harm—to lower the odds of co-dependency and predation (sex trafficking and other social-sexual forms of psychosexual dysfunction, enabling and rape) by examining the ghost of the counterfeit to achieve more stable, interdependent relationships between all workers. Many fairly present as “biologically female,” but their orientations, genders and performances don’t always align as such—i.e., the owners buck heteronormative assignment vis-à-vis natural assignment of these things expressed through iconoclastic context:

(exhibit 33b2c1c1: Artist, from top-left to bottom-right: Crow, Juliana Ferrera, Cuwu, Blxxd Bunny and Felicia Clover.

The human body tends to be symmetrical and repeat assorted elements amid corporal variation. To that, mimesis expresses a likeness of the human form, poses and context; through cryptomimesis, this extends to trauma: the AFAB body [or feminized body as male, female or intersex] is a classic site of harm, insofar as porn is liminal, always adjacent to unironic rape [disempowerment] through the monstrous-feminine as something to control by patriarchal forces. The Gothic space of play and sex work are former “torture closets” of disempowerment that, when facing a palliative Numinous [dominant], GNC people may crawl back inside to face and reform their past; i.e., in order to classically regain power over their identities, bodies, friendships, and voices. All intertwine through BDSM, kink and appreciative irony amid Gothic poetics that invent and arrange classical factors differently to assist workers collectively—through a pedagogy of the oppressed: an Aegis whose mighty ghost haunts the dreams of those who seek to dominate Medusa without irony. Such dialectical-material feuds are precisely why you can have Berlin be a sex capitol of the world and the heart of the Nazi Reich. Such things exist amid conflict over universal human rights [and that of nature] vs the equality of convenience.

Furthermore, on the Internet, the power-spread of self-employed sex workers reflects anisotropically across concentric spheres of media and the relationships we form within them—from a shoot to a gallery to a Renaissance. It’s a paradoxical place to put trust in ourselves; i.e., as something we can build together to raise awareness about harmful structures, power hierarchies, illusions [obscurantism, bad faith/acting and education; i.e., dogwhistles and strawman arguments; e.g., Greta Thunberg’s octopus “gaff”[3]] using campy doubles that fundamentally oppose these canonical “originals”: through shared aesthetics and language reclaimed by us, our reclaimed labor value challenging the established paradigm. Or, in the words of Carl Sagan, “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Labor comes from labor, art from art, inspiration from muses to artists back and forth, announcing as one, “To the workers of the world.”

[model and photographers: Cuwu and Cuwu/Persephone van der Waard] 

This comes from a delight—at giving and receiving care from those we care about and mutually respect. Furthermore, to the conversational nature of this module/volume, I find that such deathly portents generally go down easier with a slice of pie and/or cake—to celebrate bonafide babes[4] as delicious people to learn from without harmfully objectifying them, but taking their healthy and harmful aspects as object lessons to speak to the human condition at large. Is it a little indulgent to show off my stable of yummy goods, basking in their wet pastures? Sure, but never trust a skinny cook, girls.)

While we want to move away from Capitalism, Medusa does live in an imperial world—one where language and societal practices shape and maintain material conditions as dimorphically gendered by Cartesian edicts. As someone to learn from and follow to varying degrees, then, I want to be well-rounded when looking at Medusa; I’d like to invite you to consider Medusa as someone to encounter in daily life as it presently appears: something historically female-centric under state myopias that, like Cuwu’s hairy snatch, is wild in ways that Gothic poetry readily speaks out regarding. My focus remains on GNC (thus not exclusively female) components of the monstrous-feminine, of course; but “meeting Medusa” includes more traditional female forms, which certainly informed my transition from closeted to openly trans—i.e., when dealing with Cuwu as GNC, but also rather cliché in terms of their fractured behaviors: a tragic love story. We’re all damaged. The idea is to be more open about our trauma in ways that help each other find meaningful connection as a collective; i.e., generally relayed in classic love stories involving two parties personified in visually immediate forms, charged with latent eroticism (or any other means of jolting workers out of class dormancy).

 (artist: Geminisoku)

In regards to Cuwu, but really monster poetics at large expressing through them, my digging up of their figurative, “skinny-thicc” corpse and actually showing it has made me want to exhibit them—to talk about their treatment of me with fresh eyes through fresh eyes: a revelation whose voice is important towards worker survival, insofar as we must learn to reflect on painful things (trauma) in order to regain and maintain our humanity in ways the Gothic loves to bandy about; i.e., in bombastic theatrical forms that aren’t silent about things normally silenced by genocidal forces. A paradox between animals and humans, then, is that animals are often quiet to avoid predators, including apex predators. Humans, however, are generally preyed on by the state; i.e., a predicament that requires us to speak out and riot, to make some noise and damage property as something that is largely alien to other animals.

So bear with me a little  as I unpack these old engagements—considering as I do the kinds of powerful forces female bodies contain as linked to chaos as a Cartesian theatrical device with praxial inertia (a resistance to change):

(exhibit 33b2c1c2: Artist: Luca Maria. Earlier we mentioned the fat lady singing to signal the end—state shift from someone fat, sassy and loud bringing the Cartesian house down. This isn’t psychological mumbo-jumbo but a poetic commentary on vast, intersecting socio-material factors that lead to systemic change; i.e., singing out of multiple mouths, of which many things come out and for which those of a female/non-male body [or feminized AMAB body] are treated as alien/fetish. We could focus on the twink asshole [the “bussy”] if we wanted to, but we’ll explore that kind of gender trouble later in the volume [and much more in Volume Three; e.g., “Conan with a pussy” as something to exemplify with our own plastic bodies and genders—source tweet: Noah, 2024]. So, vaginas it is. For one, the vagina is often likened to an eye, implying surveillance and sentience, but also older androgynous myths of chaos that pass entropic forces of darkness into the world of light; i.e., darkness visible; e.g., the evil eye, the eye of confusion as viewed from Hell looking in on empire to wither it with scornful optics[5]: a phallic, penetrating gaze like Medusa’s stare, but other such serpents “attacking the sun” as a historically fascist power source; e.g., Apep, the Egyptian Serpent of Confusion, attacking Ra the sun god, above]. From a physical standpoint, the only human organs that lubricate are the eye and vagina; many things come out of vaginas as “eye-like,” insofar as “Hell” is a sentient, dark mentality scrutinizing the seemingly pure having ulterior motives tied to formal power.

And yet, just as readily the vagina is also a home for unwanted medical conditions primarily unique to AFAB-leaning morphologies [who frankly have far higher medical needs and restrictions regarding their bodies, per the state treating them as baby factories]; i.e., tokophobia, or the fear of pregnancy, often stress-induced but grounded in physiological torments more or less alien to AMAB bodies; e.g., yeast infections, polycystic ovarian disease, hormonal imbalance [violent mood swings], easy UTIs, toxic shock syndrome, PMS, pregnancies and menstrual cramps, rape pregnancies, etc; i.e., the cycle of the female body something to resent revolving around to the cycles of capital [attached to cycles of weather and commerce; e.g., Halloween] controlling the bodies of people who give birth: forced to give birth and sacrifice their careers and lives for “the greater good”—of the state, not the proletariat or nature. Under such circumstances, the ancient, medical notion of “hysteria” tied to female biology becomes something to fear and hold a grudge against when abjected onto foreign objects, infections, enemies. Such projections can be used to alienate someone, but also to reverse paralysis by freezing the owner’s enemies; e.g., with a thunderous queef [air], various discharges and secretions, ejaculate [from “unicorn jizz” to actual offal on par with Oblina’s turning delightfully inside-out like a frog in Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (1994), the selection of either hinging on one’s fascial preference]; i.e., flaring releases of passion as psychosexual and psychedelic, Christ-like and tortuous but also erotic when pleasure and harm confuse due to repressed trauma. It’s standard-issue abjection against the colonizer—a loud, gross-out [thus repellant] reversal using the Medusa’s classic “Aegis”: her pussy and ass as comfortable sites of tremendous, sizeable force going both ways. It has phallic potential, what the kids call “big dick energy” married to “big mommy energy” to own and playfully/comically wield his/her/their own pie and cake [whatever the gender of the baked good and its size: it’s our bakery—”oven (uterus),” included]. 

Per Angela Carter, “A free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster.” But more than that, any monstrous-feminine [she or not] will be outed and attacked by TERFs—assassins of character and person alike, punching down against the “underworld” as something to reify then protect the usual wards of the state from; i.e., Ripley, below, killing the Alien Queen to protect Newt because “black = rape baby” or whatever other pyramid-sized chip-on-their-shoulder bigoted cis women project onto/pull the trigger against state scapegoats; e.g., it’s our fault so-and-so miscarried [we fags do love a good scandal, but that’s ridiculous]. In other words, it’s “the Straights” combined with standard-issue “white people shit.”

As a friend—let’s call them Mira [pronounced “My-ra”]—puts it, this holier-than-thou approach lets privileged people be more radically in control; i.e., from medieval systems, you have priests, teachers and medical personnel suddenly driven by profit, and the ghost of the counterfeit and abjection reflecting that in a new, non-feudal system; e.g., “Young Goodman Brown” [1835] or Inside [2008] showing something other than war and male violence: female violence that is to some extent, medically accurate [as memento mori generally are] and gratuitous—all good and well if you have that information up front and can consent to paying to see it in various forms of calculated risk during Gothic entertainment. Otherwise, you’re torturing the audience [who, as Mira demonstrates, can be triggered by stress even without rape-as-a-penetrative-act[5a] being a formative experience].

There’s generally a violent character and fortress-minded reactionary [neocon] politic to such “warrior Madonna” fantasies [which are less to strictly whitewash pregnancy (immaculate birth) and more abstract it as Amazonomachia—a story to be “won” as men generally do: through combat against an evil double; i.e., non-white/trans people]. Except the usual theatrical tensions are anisotropically linked to literal physical effects, too. New mothers and babies-to-be classically teeter on a knife’s edge, the common casualty usually being the mother to prioritize the tot. This isn’t the sexless, dragging disappointment of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872), then, but a thoroughly more complicated and messy bildungsroman—one where our stand-in “Anne of Green Gables” (the adventuresome debutante) bumps spectacularly into the spectre of death while spreading her pussy lips for so-and-so. Talk about splitting the baby! A lady “on the market” can be cautious and ward off untoward/unwanted romantic advances; however, if a girl relaxes, she can involuntarily release different things from a secret, even shameful place, but also an intimate special container to let things in—i.e., with a wild, voracious hunger and feral jouissance [Cuwu: uttering “Green, bright green!” when wanting more cock, more attention, more power]. But raw hostility can outstrip vulnerability and dalliance within canonical modesty arguments, meaning a monstrous-feminine’s entrance-exits are also a mirror that reveal repressed sides of female abuse displaced onto settler-colonial scapegoats; i.e., a white, fearful gaze looking for protection with a shield but also a sword against a perceived threat: inside-outside the human and home as Gothically blurred. The Medusa is both a sex and war machine, then, but also a debutante and a milf squaring off against heroic doubles puzzled by her bare, exposed fury.

[artist: Akira Hiramoto]

To that, Segewick’s imagery of the surface[6] denudes bodies that are covered or not. So when AMAB people see not even an exposed vagina but simply the suggestion of one, they often see an opportunity or an alien fetish per heteronormative conditioning factors; when AFAB people see it, they often see a place of trauma [a void, a dark forest, but also the abusive/imposturous home; e.g., the forbidden dungeon] whose power can potentially be reclaimed by communing with the ghost of the counterfeit—i.e., the secret thing wedged deep inside a predatory victim, their mind poisoned by an unwelcome presence, a trauma, an emotional turmoil: as passed generationally through mediums, identified imperfectly on common sites of pain, of abuse, among those who could be mothers/victims [which often become abusers themselves]. It becomes superstitious, a nomadic transient force of nature [a tornado or hurricane] like that pink shit from The Cat in the Cat [1957]—a rabid, imperial-to-postcolonial force[7] that can possess and take hold; i.e., through persecution mania smashing survival mechanisms together during moral panic amid opposing social, structural, and bodily forces.

Unfortunately, it’s just as likely that surveyors of a dark presence will attack the host, marking them as banditti—as homeless, foreign, other—than see them as human: a folie-a-deux [shared psychosis] and ménage à trois [an illicit love triangle]. What’s more, social conditions and military de rigueur overlap in popular fiction’s usual clichés made medicalized and torturous, hauntologized: the coochie, the blackguard, the harlot—the romance something to field and thread within a captive audience’s enforced constraint/politeness trapping’s ceremonial courtship displays [e.g., buying a drink, lighting a cigarette in a venue of sin, but also exchange]—as biomechanical, dated, eternal [outside time]. It speaks to secret shames, guilt and eroticism, the sexual predator and traumatized angry survivor’s rape and incest, murder and madness as built up in the tissue, flaring up and expelling through a body or area of the body as damaged and overstimulated, confused and charged, but also septic and overridden with Numinous power [again, the ghost of the counterfeit]: primed to explode with a confused ejection through a walking testimony of repressed evidence rising to the surface. Per the Gothic, such paradoxes express in inherent contradictions, moral dilemmas, ontological strife, swelling and irritation, vanishing clarity and augmenting decay through masked disintegration part of a larger disease process and its complications: its diminishing stability [the sands of time] counting down, running low to higher degrees of entropy.

In turn, this surface tension only invites more opportunities to abuse; i.e., those who are pegged as vulnerable initially become abused by a system that crosses their wires to an apocalyptic extreme; it leads to a revelation regarding unspeakable harm, which reports on those who, threatened by it, self-report. The idea is dignity through praxis. So, with Jadis and Cuwu, I worked with them to try and help them because I knew they had been hurt, and learned that it’s still ok to have limits and break things off—what’s called an “extinction burst”:  

An extinction burst is a sudden spike in the frequency of a behavior when the reinforcement for that behavior is removed. Because the action has produced a desirable result in the past, it is tried rapidly until it is clear the action no longer will result in the expected reward [source: Study.com]. 

 This goes both ways, of course; e.g., Jadis did it for me when I stopped giving into their demands. I did it with both them and Cuwu when it became clear they each were bad for me. Even so, it wasn’t my first choice. For one, I was emotionally battered/invested and sought compensation amid intrigue and peril, unequal conditions, sex and separation. Social work, while never easy, is especially rugged when the predator and prey are confused in one body and across them: I was small, weak, and marked, but also generous—the perfect prey being a former victim as seen by once-victims convinced if they seize control, they won’t get hurt again, themselves. Except, I’m not convinced Cuwu or Jadis was always in control of that, and often seemed fractured and at war in highly psychomachic ways—their confused fight-or-fight mechanisms somehow “always on,” thus further alerted and incensed by always feeling trapped [what Jadis referred to as “hypervigilance”]: within boundaries rising and falling through membranes of exchange [sight or otherwise].

Was I manipulated into withdrawing my complaints, driven into hiding while sending my abusers along? It’s not a simple yes or no, and the fact remains that outing powerful sexual predators [or frankly just bad partners] requires solidarity. By showing Jadis, Zeuhl and Cuwu mercy in my case, I demonstrated I wasn’t a product of abuse that simply led to more abuse; by critiquing them, post-escape, I could prevent it by outing societal problems—red flags to recognize and avoid, second-nature.

This is more important than picking fights against single scapegoats. If someone is abused, outing their individual abuser is ultimately their choice. In my case, I spoke about what I felt mattered to make society better. To that, my desire to enrich the world trumped my need for petty revenge or fairytale closure (with “revenge” often translating to a code of silence/omerta that protects the state; e.g., the thin blue line closing ranks to defend property at the cost of workers; i.e., cops are criminals with a badge [and stochastic, de facto deputized forms of police violence] because “criminality” is to abuse people and nature for profit: the “greater good” of the state versus workers making decisions that affect their own lives [and the lives of other workers and nature] for the better).

 [artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu] 

This resolution comes from repeated reflection based on limited perspective. In Cuwu’s case, I was their lover and photographer—always looking at them in a mirror or through a camera lens, seeing various parts of them from so many different angles and vantage points. Despite how vain they were and how perfect they appeared, I saw good sides and bad. Yes, Cuwu abused me. Except, they ultimately helped me, too. When Jadis threw me out, Cuwu gave me a place to stay and a bed to sleep in [not that we always used it, left]. They showed me their books, giving me their copy of A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. They also encouraged me to experiment—to try messing with gender and anal sex, eventually making me feel brave and beautiful enough to come out as trans[8] [the anal sex wasn’t just a fun alternative to vaginal sex (or backup when Cuwu’s pussy got sore from marathon sex), but helped me overcome my closeted anxieties and bigotries regarding that part of the body]. In the end, it wasn’t stable or secure—Cuwu was a profoundly messy person, a walking carnival whose own history of giving and receiving abuse prevented them from staying my friend—but I’ll never forget what they did when it mattered: to give me a safe [if untidy] venue to transition towards my future self.)

All this being said, we’re aiming for intersectional solidarity as monomorphic; i.e., regarding the liberation of all workers from a heteronormative paradigm and its universal alienation, fetishizing and grim harvest. As such, the same predicaments outlined above apply not just to AFAB people, but the monstrous-feminine at large as something to dig up and fuck with (a reversal of the “bury your gays” trope, but also investigating the embodiment of different frustrations and anger exemplified by the Medusa; i.e., as someone to celebrate and recognize: the overmedicalization of female bodies as controlled by the state and its proponents, therefore policed to uphold the status quo).

I love cuties, and could make a whole book celebrating just Cuwu’s beauty and pain as something to learn from—to say proudly that I knew someone so profoundly force-of-nature, focusing on the Destroyer or lamb-like aesthetic they exuded. Medusa, however, is an androgynous figure divided and shared amongst a legion of GNC personnel. So as much as I’d like to stay and enjoy the non-binary memory of Cuwu as someone to bask in, I’d rather focus on those persons with the capacity to a) not cause harm, and b) actively participate in Gothic-Communist rebellion: to help animals like Bay does, to be a thorn in the state’s side.

To that, fate is often likened to a cruel mistress who denies, a fickle bitch not out of place in a BDSM scenario (e.g., orgasm or penetration denial, or other such treats to condition non-violent restraint with); Mother Nature is generally regarded as the Alpha and the Omega, the denuded invincible viewed as “pure chaos” by psychoanalytical quacks one step removed from Cartesian dominance—i.e., from “nature is female” to “chaos is female” to “woman is other” as a furious ancient, the shapeless place of maternal death where the patriarchal buck always stops. It’s “true power” insofar as the state cannot dominate it; nature will survive, smiling knowingly while the state eventually crumbles to dust—from old age, which we outlast and outbreed, but also out teach, consulting our own experience, second opinions, regulations, unions, etc. This often starts with us being hurt, or seeing others being hurt in our lives or older past lives, and wanting to help them heal; and prevent future harm, too. This isn’t a curse, but a mighty gift. Per Creed, this kind of generosity and reactivity becomes something to fear as alien to the state’s existence, but also what the state needs to exist by tampering with it, causing it to lash out.

(artist: Bay)

Volume One previously extended this Cartesian myopia to my arguments, applying “other” to all of nature as monstrous-feminine food moving money through nature to generate profit; re: “Women (and all monstrous-feminine ‘non-men’) are food whose harvesting serves a Cartesian profit motive,” by which monster mothers like Medusa (as in, likenesses of the Medusa, which the xenomorph is) refuse to be victims differently than Creed put it in 1993 (abridged, from the glossary):

monstrous-feminine

While Creed focuses on the desire for the cis woman not to be a victim, thus terrifying men in abject, monstrous ways (which are often then crucified by heteronormative agents, including token ones like Ellen Ripley), the fact remains that the monstrous-feminine extends to a much broader persecution network; i.e., of any “feminine” force that falls outside of what is acceptable within the Patriarchy’s heteronormative colonial binary. I have placed feminine in quotes to account for anything perceived as “feminine” thus not correctly “male”; i.e., “woman is other” expanded to trans, intersex and non-binary persons (and the animals associated with them…

For the rest of this chapter half, then, we’ll consider Mother Nature as abject in ways we can ultimately reverse by humanizing her “ancient alien” fetish in spite of capital.

Doing so, our focus remains bodies first, structures second. We’ll focus on living spaces whenever we examine Metroidvania; for the remainder of the current lesson, I’ve outlined five person-centric steps for us to explore. We’ll start by examining teaching as expressed between media and our bodies—a connection we’ll showcase as something to coach,. After that, we’ll segue into conflict, mothers-in-conflict, and monstrous-feminine liberation.

Onwards, to learn from Medusa in other media forms besides! Onto “Teaching and Coaching“!

Postscript

Before we press on, consider this postscript: the Gothic tends to diverge and synonymize things that, on their own, merit a whole field of study. As such, I want to give a minor extension to the concept of monstrous-feminine as it pertains to space and occupant as hyphenated, concentric, ergodic, anisotropic, etc. Monsters speak to givers and receivers of state force, whose iconoclastic ironies during ludo-Gothic BDSM rope gentler groups (e.g., pillow princesses, catboys and subby twinks) into the same Gothic scheme: courtly love and chercher la femme. I wanted to use an example other than Alien or its obvious Amazonian doubles, insofar as they all involve Amazonomachy-style kayfabe pitting the warrior-detective (the cutie with combat training and professional equipment) against the Archaic Mother/demon lover as occupying a doubled house infected with the ghost of the counterfeit; e.g., Samus killing her doubles offspring (a war of extermination, per settler colonial relegated to “empty” ruins); i.e., a liminal space and occupant, but also exchange that is both diegetic and meta (the Nostromo a castle-in-small, both as a set to run around inside and a miniature to film with giant cameras held by giant hands—a ludic concept that extends to videogame players holding the controller and looking at the tiny avatar onscreen as armored, but hounded by giant, pissed-off alien moms):

The ambivalent paragon, Samus is the perfect switch for me to control. She’s also linked to the monstrous castle: its heir, the potential gorgon. And I, attracted to female heroes, project onto it. She’s my conflicted sense of self, including my conscious desire to be a woman—not Marilyn Monroe or Emily St. Aubert, but a capable scrapper who’s decked in armor and easy on the eyes (for me this means “boyish,” like Tolkien’s Dernhelm [“hidden protector”] and Joan of Arc) [source: Persephone van der Waard’s “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution,” 2021].

(artist: Moonshen)

Being balls-deep* in the text, and related stories, I’m extra sensitive to stimulations that yield fresh discourse (so much “discourse”); so my muses (all of them) make me sing more prolifically and readily than normal. As such, this section is heavily informed by my PhD research/formative works. If you like this and want to see more, reference to the raft of sources (my older writings) [supplied at the end of this postscript]; if you’re into Metroidvania and speedrunning in particular, I also recommend checking out my “Mazes and Labyrinths” Q&A, Interview Compendium” (2021). It interviews a lot of Metroid(vania) speedrunners according to/in line with my research ideas. —Perse

*Medusa demonstrates how normal mothers are a myth. Case in point, the above phrase, “balls-deep,” once came up when my mother and I were watching Kick Ass (2010); i.e., the head gangster, mad with rage, spitting to his cronies, “I wanna be balls-deep in their ass!” Without missing a beat, my mother—sitting in the periphery—smiled wickedly, nodded approvingly and repeated the phrase with pure relish, “‘Balls-deep in their ass.'” I repeat, there are no normal mothers—including me and my mother, but also those from both of our childhoods extending forwards and backwards; e.g., all of the monsters in Metroidvania and similar monstrous-feminine stories; i.e., portents of the Medusa in all directions, spaces, bodies, BDSM, etc.

Moving past Amazons, I still want to examine something that is still unheimlich and psychosexually violent, but with a different kind of infantilization than that of the newborn xenomorph giving out “free hugs” with blind reckless abandon; i.e., the doll house and doll-like simulacra lurking inside of it as monstrous-feminine space—the walking fortress as outwardly cuddly in muse-like palimpsestuous echoes of Western exports imported back in a global market: videogames and anime as moody digestions of classic factors endemic to the colonizer body made in Japan and sold back to American audiences.

This is rooted in a Neo-Gothic past that originated in Great Britain; or, as I write/cite in Volume Zero, “Classically the diegetic heroine’s perfect past is doubled by the Gothic castle as an expression of power beyond just her or her sense of self and home. As Audronė Raškauskienė writes in Gothic Fiction: The Beginnings [2017]”:

The castle, Bakhtin remarks, as a literary reminder of an ancestral or Gothic past of “dynastic primacy and transfer of heroic rights” [actually, it’s “hereditary rites,” though I do the same thing in this book, too] is overlaid or criss-crossed with meanings from legend, fairy-tale, history, architecture, and an eighteenth-century aesthetizing discourse of the sublime. Montague Summers’s note that the real protagonist of the Gothic novel is the castle emphasizes a very special feature of that structure: in a sense, the Gothic castle is ‘alive’ with a power that perplexes its visitors. It tends to have an irregular shape, its lay-out is very complex and mysterious, whether because of an actual distortion of the whole structure or because a part of it remains unknown. In Manuel Aguirre’s words, “this basic distortion yields mystery, precludes human control and endows the building with a power beyond its strictly physical structure: the irregular mysterious house is, like the vampire, a product of the vitalistic conception of nature.”

In addition to this, Radcliffe’s setting (the castle) derives its claim to sublimity also from its being “not-here, not-now, an Other place, an Other time.” Critics have often remarked on the choice of the exotic, the foreign, the barbaric as the background for and source of Gothic thrills. In other words, the Gothic castle is the world of the Numinous. As David Durant notes, “the ruined castles and abbeys are graphic symbols of the disintegration of a stable civilization; their underground reaches are the hiding places for all those forces which cannot stand the light of day.” In Radcliffe’s novels the Gothic castle is in the first place an anti-home, a nightmare version of the heroine’s perfect past, in which many of the elements of her home are exaggerated and replayed in a Gothic form. The Gothic space, which provides a scene for the most dramatic events in the novel, is totally different from the other spaces – indicating heroine’s home.

The gigantic size of the castle is opposed to smallness of heroine’s home, its labyrinthine confusion stands in opposition to the elegant and tasteful arrangement of her home, dark and dim castles replace cheerful and full of sunshine homes, the feeling of constant danger and lack of security in the castles is contrasted with the feeling of safety in heroine’s home, etc. The heroine’s parents are replaced by Gothic substitutes or Gothic opposites. The castle hides some family secret the revelation of which usually helps the heroine to disclose her own identity. At the same time, the Gothic castle is the place of confinement in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the castle may be interpreted as the image of the body and, eventually, as the heroine’s secret self (source).

The original point of the big-ass quote was my connecting it to modern media, namely videogames as a Japanese export. Per Metroidvania and my master’s thesis, “Lost in Necropolis” (2018), the Gothic historically-materially yields trauma as a) paradoxically unmappable but mapped nonetheless in various texts that likewise branch out through the same viral pathways, and b) personified through odd valleys of contrasts: size difference; i.e., the knightly space cowgirl stomping around foreign-familiar territories, a galactic operative strong-arming settler-colonial frontiers back into federal control.

(artist: François Coutu)

Samus might be the baddest bitch of the Imperial Core (in space); she’s still dwarfed by the eternal size and beauty of the maternal spaces she’s sent to rape for the Man: a little girl who grows up with daddy issues, bitch-slapping echoes of female abuses (and their pet male dragons) that cannot be contained.

Moving past the Amazon, the monstrous-feminine isn’t just mommy doms and Medusas with big-girl bodies, though, but smaller bodies with big trauma, thus big angst and ultimately power and craft, manipulating it against potential threats unwelcome in their home; i.e., us versus them enacted by the vulnerable-made-Numinous: little monsters that hold all of Hell’s power inside of them, of the house, as two sides of the same warped ontological statement. They become like walking gravestones that throw giant shadows to terrify patriarchal forces, including tokenized inspectors sticking their noses where they really shouldn’t. Curiosity killed the cat, after all, beckoning you inside while reaching towards you with a shambling corpse’s impossibly long arms:

(artist: Bryton Spurgeon)

Keeping with that adage (not Lady Macbeth’s: “the cat likes fish, but does not like to wet her paws”), we absolutely must inspect the kawaii and kowai (“cute” and “scary”) dichotomy of J-horror culture, embodying a “killer doll” of “daddy’s little girl” (the ghost of the counterfeit) lurking in the Gothic castle as a nightmarish copy of the heroine’s perfect past (re: which can be gender-swapped, Dennis-Cooper-style, to afford the twink-in-peril some delicious “danger” to play with): a liminal space whose partially lucid dream must be carefully navigated to confront hidden secrets obscured by a restless labyrinthine cryptonymy (not really any different than strictly Western [occupier] forms). Waiting at the center of the claustrophobia (Radcliffe’s Black Veil and closed space) is generally the queen of the space, a fractured Numinous that is both infantilized and feral, a queen bitch trapped in a little girl’s body or vice versa; i.e., the euthanasia effect of acknowledging “Medusa’s” pain while still “pulling a Radcliffe” and putting her down like a rabid bitch.

All the same, the idea for spaces that master players who try to master the space through its coded instructions (re: Giddings and Kennedy) are, per my own arguments, enacting ludo-Gothic BDSM through a steady and negotiated ludic contract between them that goes beyond novels and cinema, into videogames, but also real life as half-real. This happens, then, as per the dom and the sub in any kind of roleplay scenario; but in Metroidvania and similar stories, the perfect dom (the one to take you to the edge but not harm you) is as much the castle, the game, the text as it is the Medusa-like persona inside.

In poetic terms, they are one in the same, synonymized and hyphenated to delivered the paradoxical goods: exquisite “torture” unto another generation of workers living with trauma. This has many utilities that, when synthesized, can lead towards catharsis while stripping us bare, vulnerably exposed to a capitalist and Communist Numinous we can invoke as needed:

(exhibit 33b2c1c2b: Aguirre’s aforementioned geometries of terror, presented with a wide corpus of texts and their liminal spaces from different mediums: Top-far-left: The Nostromo’s exterior, from Alien; middle-far-left: Rugrats episode “In the Dreamtime,” 1993—horror being a common theme through the whole Rugrats series; bottom-far-left: The Witch’s House, 2012; middle-left descending strip: Little Nightmares 2, 2021; middle descending strip: scenes from Coraline, 2009, and Inside, 2016; middle-right descending strip: scenes from Among the Sleep, 2014; far-right descending strip: the Nostromo interior from Alien; bottom horizontal strip: scenes and locations from the 2017 Metroidvania, Hollow Knight.

All these texts explore liminal parallel spaces as ambiguously Gothic—with monstrous hauntologies, concentric nightmares, and uncanny inhabitants that intimate a re-remembered “return” to a reimagined childhood. Not only is this lost childhood imperfect; it is replete with abusive intimations that generally convey regression through fantasies of paradoxical danger and rape fantasies tied to chronotopic power structures: “a fearful inheritance tied to an ancestral location loaded with decaying, heavy time,” to paraphrase from David Punter’s definition of a Gothic tale [or Baldrick’s]. Seeing as I can’t find the exact quote [academia, especially British Gothic academia, paywalls everything in sight] this quote from James Watts’ Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict [1999] does the trick:

In a period of industrialization and rapid social change, according to Punter, Gothic works insistently betrayed the fears and anxieties of the middle classes about the nature of their ascendancy, returning to the issues of ancestry, inheritance, and the transmission of property: “Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising to find the emergence of a literature whose key motifs are paranoia, manipulation and injustice, and whose central project is understanding the inexplicable, the taboo, the irrational” (source: “Gothic Definitions,” 2021).

I think Punter is definitely more overtly psychoanalytical than Marxist most of the time [source: “Punter Notes on Gothic” from The Literature of Terror] but I still enjoy his analytical approach sometimes. As for my own thoughts on such spaces [from Volume Two]: the aim is to expose past traumas related to state abuse, but also to fuck with the player as someone seeking agency within these spaces by negotiating with the game; e.g., Metroidvania, but also games like The Witch’s House.

[artist: Smolb]

Simply put, fucking is fun, but it takes many different forms, including BDSM as asexual. In either game, the gameplay is based on mastery of the player “forced” to submit in different forms without bringing overt sex into the equation [merely echoes of it]; while Metroidvania are ludic and learn into ludo-Gothic themes of dominating the player mid-execution, the cinematic nature of The Witch’s House yields a more orthographic/cinematic twist that stubbornly resists player dominion. Courtesy of Bakhtin, the castle and its endless dynasty of power exchange have thematic primacy—i.e., the fear of inheriting one’s role in a larger destructive cycle that relegates the hero to a lonely doom in within the interminable stone corridors of a hungry tomb (that literally has their name on it). As I write in, “Our Ludic Masters”:

Metroidvania players consent to the game by adopting a submissive position. Most people sexualize BDSM, but power is exchanged in any scenario, sexual or otherwise. This being said, Gothic power exchanges are often sexualized. Samus is vulnerable when denuded, her naked body exposed to the hostile alien menace (re: the end scene from Alien). Metroidvania conjure dominance and submission through a player that winds up “on the hip” (an old expression that means “to be at a disadvantage”). Another way to think of it is, the player is the bottom, and they’re being topped by the game. 

[…] A person motivated by sex is hardly in control. Not to mention, the sex historically offered by Metroid is fraught with peril. The entire drive is illustrated by gameplay conducive to speedrunning at a basic level. The same strategies employed by the best runners are executed by regular players. You play the game and begin to play it faster. In some sense, this “maze mastery” is involuntary. The player cannot help but play the game faster as they begin to re-remember the maze. The game exploits this, repeatedly leading the player towards self-destruction and domination.

These feelings are orgasmic, but differently than the Doom Slayer’s own attempts at conquest. They’re a Gothic orgasm, a kind of exquisite torture. I say “exquisite” because they occur within the realm of play [which grants them asexual elements]. For Metroidvania, this jouissance is ludic. But sometimes a game can blur the lines. Though not a Metroidvania, the RPG Maker game The Witch’s House remains a salient example.

You play as Viola, a young girl visiting her mysterious friend’s spooky house. Inside the titular house, the player can learn its rules, thus explore the gameworld. This inexorable progression is inevitably doomed, the outcome heinous no matter the player or their skill. Like Charlotte Dacre’s titanic Zofloya providing Victoria with poison, the game lends the player the instruments for their own demise[: the sword for the Roman fool to fall upon]. Tenacious players are even promised a “best” ending if they “master” the game, beating it without dying. The game only doubles down, punishing the player with virtually the same ending. / This ending is about as brutal as they come. Even so, such players will have beaten the game already and know the ending—if not it, then games with a similar outcome (re: self-destruction). Players are expected to revel in the game’s sadism, deriving pleasure from “punishment” while the game, for lack of a better term, bends them over and fucks them (source).

[artist: Yune Kagesaki]

Just as the Gothic often takes an asexual approach to sex, “fucking” isn’t literal, but yields many different applications within monstrous power exchange as a fun activity. It’s fun to fuck with people, especially when they’re in on the performance to some extent [though perhaps only to a degree]. Whatever surprises, deceptions and “fucking” do occur happen relative to fearful spaces occupied with concerns about imposters, but especially a tyrannical past’s “return.” While Giddings and Kennedy’s “Little Jesuses and *@#?-off Robots” touches on a game’s mastering of players, “allowing progression through the game only if the players recognize what they are being prompted to do, and comply with these coded instructions,” players can fight back; yet, this is proposition is, as I have stated, more of a compromise or negotiation between the player and the game:

I can watch other people try to master the game, and watch them be dominated by the space. Not even speedrunners can escape this embarrassment, their blushing faces conjoined with the statues already screaming on the walls. How fleeting a victory like Shiny Zeni’s is, when it will eventually be bested. Or buried [ibid.].

To use a BDSM term, some games are clearly more “strict” than others; e.g., The Witch’s House really doesn’t fuck around [an extended quote from “Our Ludic Masters,” just because]:

There are many phobias and taboos surrounding this position, from men being afraid of penetration, to women wanting what they can’t have unless it’s given to them. Being fucked by a videogame, the player consents or stops the game, thus has power. But if the game fucks them at the end, the player can feel like they’ve been fucked from the start. Sneaky! There’s invariably a sense of misdirection at times. The game—and by that I mean many games, not just The Witch’s House—remain dominant. Metroidvania and The Witch’s House use Gothic situations and imagery to suggest danger while simultaneously misleading the self-deceiving player to be fucked.

Sometimes the already-initiated go willingly and joyously partake of the Numinous pounding. Even so, the ending for The Witch’s House is brutal. The “witch” isn’t actually the witch; she’s Viola, the story’s victim. The avatar is Viola’s body, possessed by the witch. The story begins when “you” take control, sending “Viola” to the witch’s house. Before you do, Viola’s father sends you a note telling you not to go into the forest; you aren’t the witch, so the forest is dangerous. Little do either of you know… 

The note misleads the reader—in this case the player—into thinking Viola is you, not the witch. Turns out, you’re controlling Viola’s body but the witch is inside with you. Zoiks! The possession is gradually hinted through journal entries you find inside the house: The witch “swapped” bodies with Viola before the start of the game (it starts right after the possession, in the forest). The house tries to kill you upon entry. So why go back?

Turns out, the witch’s powers are tied to her body not her mind. But her original body is occupied by Viola’s spirit, who angrily tries to attack the witch using the witch’s powers. These include the house, which is effectively an extension of the witch’s power (re: Dracula’s castle, in Castlevania). To steal her power back, the witch needs a knife locked inside a cabinet near the front of the house (spatially the start of the game). To get the knife, the witch must use Viola’s body to navigate the house, reach the “witch,” and steal a key from her. The key unlocks the cabinet, which has the knife. 

Once the power is hers, “Viola” leaves the house; the “witch” follows her, crawling along the ground with her eyes gouged out (symbolizing the player’s blindness). “Viola” taunts the dying girl until a man approaches, Viola’s father. He sees the “witch” and panics, drawing his gun. He rushes to protect “Viola,” yelling for the “monster” to get back. Viola doesn’t heed him, crawling closer while saying his name. But she has no actual voice; her words appear only in her mind. He fires his weapon, killing her. With the “witch” killed, the house (an extension of its owner’s original body) collapses into itself and disappears.

During the finale, the player is meant to identify more with the “witch” than their own avatar. Viola becomes “Viola” through the player’s realization that she (thus the game) has been lying to them for the entire story. The avatar is occupied by two individuals: the player controlling her, and by an imposter the player can no longer control. Almost like being possessed, no? The player thinks they are Viola, hence Viola’s body belongs to them. They aren’t Viola, they’re the witch; or rather, the witch is inside them, and assumes control once Viola is dead.

The real horror is retrospective: One, the hero was already dead, trapped inside a blind, disintegrating body while attacking Viola to warn the player (the player reacts towards the hostile home like Viola’s father did towards his transformed daughter—with fear and aggression). Two, every action made by the player to preserve “Viola” was actually keeping the witch, the hero’s destroyer, alive. Three, the hero ultimately fails, and the villain wins. The player is hoodwinked into self-destruction. Ignominious death? Check. Initially the player controls the hero thinking they are the hero. Future playthroughs are made by a player who knows they’re playing an imposter. Perhaps they think they can defeat this menace by “really” beating the game: acquiring the “best ending.” Instead, the game wins, trapping the player inside a foregone conclusion. There is no escape. [Time to die, to get fucked, to relish in the sweet, sweet domination of you by the game.]

This entrapment highlights the game’s storybook nature. The words on a page are fixed, fating the hero. Slowly by surely they’re lead down an ominous path, and to the Spooky Room Where Bad Things Happen. This promise of danger becomes Radcliffe’s infamous Black Veil—known not for its ability to conceal (which it doesn’t), but for its constant threatening nature. This danger is liminal—felt regardless if the veil is parted or not. 

Part of the joy is the journey, but the destination remains important. The so-called “bad ending” is famous in Gothic stories, delivering feelings of self-destruction through reliable modes (abjection, the uncanny and the Numinous, etc). In this sense the aforementioned “fucking” is received by the player through these modes. The Witch’s House employs them expertly. Yes, the ludic structure is different than Metroidvania typically are; their rapturous, self-destructive outcomes are more similar to each other by far than to Doom [source].

Yet the ludo-BDSM arrangements outlined above are ultimately cathartic because they occur as part of an informed exchange in regards to one’s own trauma and agency going hand-in-hand with Gothic poetics. In sex-positive realms, then submission is more powerful than domination because the game cannot be played without the sub’s permission. Barring someone holding a gun to your head, there is always a choice.)

There’s no clock/expiration date/statute of limitations on rape; it fucks up one person and all of them inside shared spaces and stages to perform when challenging state forces and doubles across history as forever being written. From Strawberry Hill/Otranto to the Nostromo/Zebes to The Witch’s House to my thesis and Sex Positivity series, the Gothic “rape” space gives us a vital liminal space to relieve stress, but also perform and play with power as a profound means of interrogating trauma dressed up as silly-serious entertainment warped by historical forces that are constantly upgrading “evil” as something to sell controlled opposition to workers that workers can own, thus reclaim through speculative thinking* vis-à-vis performative interpretations; e.g., Jason X (2001, above) being just thing this sub-drop junkie (me) would seek out; i.e., supplied by the state and subverted by us when developing Gothic Communism, synthesizing praxis to achieve a wider catharsis more emotionally and Gothically intelligent, but also aware at a class-cultural level during wars thereof. Inside these ludo-Gothic BDSM spaces and roles’ liminal positions (dungeons and damsels/demons), we can purposefully lose control and fuck ourselves—all the better to escape state illusions inside our own liberatory one’s of “imprisonment”: “Oh, no! My little bussy is totally in danger right meow! Owo!”

*The Gothic loves to investigate things that seem “off,” on all registers; i.e., that seem both completely random and oddly specific; e.g., from state shift and climate change to Alien‘s pair of haunted houses to Gilligan eating the skipper to your weird neighbor or relative with the dodgy eyeball.

Post-Postscript

Post-postscript: In regards to the further reading I want to supply, I don’t wish to “flash my badge” needlessly. All the same, I did write my MA (“Lost in Necropolis“) and PhD (my thesis volume, aka Volume Zero, 2023) on Metroidvania, and have several more books in the works including this volume (written when the sample was live, but the volume was not)—a reality that is often questioned by Dunning-Kruger types who project/transfer their own inadequacies onto experts such as myself. This isn’t hypothetical; I once had someone on Reddit (there’s a surprise) attack me for writing about Garfield and the Gothic (Persephone van der Waard’s “Is Garfield (1978-present) Gothic?” 2019), requiring me to essentially tell them, “I’m not your dad”:

Zeuhl—ever the twit and spineless, sell-out square—told me not to engage in such revelatory antics, but frankly I don’t give a damn and think it’s funny (two more ways to get even, twisting the knife through my own Austenian successes; i.e., politely telling them [more or less] “to eat shit” while fanning my eyelashes). Also, pro tip: always document everything and stand up for yourself when others won’t.

Note: If the above exhibit is, for some reason, hard to read, you can access the original on Reddit at r/imsorryjon “News: Is Garfield (1978-present) Gothic?” (2019). 

Further Reading

Here is some further reading you might find fun (lifted from two definitions from the Sex Positivity glossary):

Metroidvania as closed space

In the past, my academic/postgraduate work has thoroughly examined the Metroidvania ludonarrative (including speedruns) as a closed/parallel ergodic space; while my critical voice has changed considerably since 2018, I want to show the evolution of my work/gender identity leading into Sex Positivity‘s genesis by listing my entire Metroidvania corpus:

• my master’s thesis, which studies the ways in which speedrunners create castle-narrative through recursive motion inside the Metroidvania as a Gothic chronotope: “Lost in Necropolis: The Continuation of Castle-Narrative beyond the Novel or Cinema, and into Metroidvania” (2018)
• a BDSM reflection on ludo-Gothic themes in Metroid: “Revisiting My Masters’ Thesis on Metroidvania—Our Ludic Masters: The Dominating Game Space” (2021)
• a deeper follow-up to “Our Ludic Masters”: “Why I Submit: A Subby Gothicist’s Attitudes on Metroidvania, Mommy Doms, and Sexual Persecution” (2021)
• a study of abjection and traditional gender theory vis-à-vis Barbara Creed in Metroidvania: “War Vaginas: Phallic Women, Vaginal Spaces and Archaic Mothers in Metroid” (2021)
• a Q&A interview series that interviews Metroid speedrunners about Metroidvania for my postgrad work: the abstract for “Mazes and Labyrinths: Disempowerment in Metroidvania and Survival Horror” (2021)
• a chapter I wrote about Metroid for an unfinished book: “The Promethean Quest and James Cameron’s Military Optimism in Metroid [exhibit 5e]” (2021)

Though imperfect, these older pieces try to show how the poststructuralist method—when taken beyond its somewhat limited 1960s/70s praxial scope (the ’70s being the emergence of academic Gothic thought)—can be critically empowered in dialectical-material ways; i.e., to actually critique capital through iconoclastic monsters, BDSM/power exchange and spaces in Metroidvania, but also immensely creative interpretations/responses to those variables as already existing for me to rediscover in my own work: speedrunning as a communal effect for solving complex puzzles and telling Gothic ludonarratives in highly inventive ways. As we’ll see moving forward, this strategy isn’t just limited to videogames, but applies to any poetic endeavor during oppositional praxis. —Perse

Metroidvania

A type of Gothic videogame, one involving the exploration of castles and other closed spaces in an ergodic framework; i.e., the struggle of investigating past trauma as expressed through the Gothic castle and its monstrous caverns (which is the author poetically hinting at systemic abuses in real life). Scott Sharkey insists he coined the term (source tweet: evilsharkey, 2023) —ostensibly in the early 2000s while working with Jeremy Parish for 1-Ups.com. However, the term was probably being used before that in the late ’90s to casually describe the 1997 PSOne game, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night; records of it being used can be found as early as 2001 (this Circle of the Moon Amazon review is from 2003). By 2006, though, Jeremy Parish had a personalized definition on his own blog, “GameSpite | Compendium of Old and Useless Information” (2012):

“Metroidvania” is a stupid word for a wonderful thing. It’s basically a really terrible neologism that describes a videogame genre which combines 2D side-scrolling action with free-roaming exploration and progressive skill and item collection to enable further, uh, progress. As in Metroid and Koji Igarashi-developed Castlevania games. Thus the name (source).

My own postgrad research (“Mazes and Labyrinths”) has expanded/narrowed the definition quite a bit:

Metroidvania are a location-based videogame genre that combines 2D, 2.5D, or 3D platforming [e.g., Dark Souls, 2009] and ranged/melee combat—usually in the 3rd person—inside a giant, closed space. This space communicates Gothic themes of various kinds; encourages exploration* depending on how non-linear the space is; includes progressive skill and item collection, mandatory boss keys and variable gating mechanics (bosses, items, doors); and requires movement powerups in some shape or form, though these can be supplied through RPG elements as an optional alternative.

*Exploration pertains to the deliberate navigation of space beyond that of obvious, linear routes—to search for objects, objectives or secrets off the beaten path (source).

Also from “Mazes and Labyrinths”:

Mazes and Labyrinths: I treat space as essential when defining Metroidvania. Mazes and labyrinths are closed space; their contents exist within a closed structure, either a maze or a labyrinth. A classical labyrinth is a linear system with one set, unicursal path towards an end point; a maze is a non-linear system with multiple paths to an end point [classical texts often treated the words as interchangeable].

Metroidvania, etymology: As its most basic interpretation, Metroidvania is a portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania, specifically “Metroid” + “-vania.” However, the term has no singular, universally-agreed-upon definition. Because I focus on space, my definitions—of the individual portmanteau components—are as follows:

“Metroid” =/= the franchise, Metroid; “Metroid” = that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the maze.

“-vania” =/= the franchise, Castlevania; “castlevania” equals that franchise’s unique treatment of closed space—the labyrinth.

At the same time, “Metroid,” or “metro” + “-oid” means “android city.” “Castlevania” or “castle” + “-vania” means “other castle,” “demon castle,” or “castle Dracula.” The portmanteau, “Metroidvania” ≈ “android city” + “demon castle” + “maze” + “labyrinth.”

In terms of appearance, a Metroidvania’s audiovisual presentation can range from retro-future sci-fi to Neo-Gothic fantasy. Nevertheless, their spaces typically function as Gothic castles; replete with hauntological monsters, demons, and ghosts, they guide whatever action the hero must perform when navigating the world and dealing with its threats (ibid.)

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Footnotes

[1] Capitalism generally reduces all AFAB people to women and all women to sex objects; from there, it forces them to compete for limited positions, encouraging tokenization: so-called “pretty privilege” really being conventional dissonance and conformity.

[2] E.g., Cuwu harmed me, but my critique of their still-available erotic material is done under the boundaries last negotiated by us. I provide these critiques to foster dialectical behavioral therapy as something they introduced me to, and which I liken to Gothic Communism in practice: preventing the self-destruction of one’s friendships by learning gracefully from past mistakes. As such, I have left Cuwu anonymous, and would ask people to leave them in peace, wherever they are.

[3] Referring to a social media incident shortly after the Hamas attack on October 2023, where fash-friendly types went after Greta Thunberg—by taking a neurodivergent “octo plushie” in her solidarity photo op and applying a strawman argument to it; i.e., what is essentially video window dressing in order to “win” a debate in bad faith: getting Greta to censor something about themselves and their production that everyone knows isn’t a Nazi argument. Or as Ed Dickson writes in “Targeted for an Octopus” (2023):

In a follow-up tweet, Thunberg, who is autistic, clarified that the plush octopus on her shoulder was not a reference to a (frankly, somewhat historically obscure) anti-Semitic canard, but to a common toy used by neurodivergent people to express their feelings. “It has come to my knowledge that the stuffed animal shown in my earlier post can be interpreted as a symbol for antisemitism, which I was completely unaware of,” she wrote. “The toy in the picture is a tool often used by autistic people as a way to communicate feelings. We are of course against any type of discrimination, and condemn antisemitism in all forms and shapes. This is non-negotiable. That is why I deleted the last post” (source).

Unfortunately for Greta, conceding this frankly absurd point to fascists is negotiating with them (except, to be fair to Greta, she was being dogpiled, thus kettled, by a pack of fascist bullies [defense of Israel is fascism] intent on rattling her). We can’t play the game by fascist rules; i.e., being a doormat to their obscurantism (the octopus doesn’t belong to fascists any more than the Swastika does). But sparring with fascists pigs does take thick skin and experience, to such a degree as can sorely test even the likes of a 21-year-old, 4’11” firecracker like Greta (a wallflower she ain’t). Chin up, kid; you rock, and Neo-Nazis bottle J. K. Rowling’s farts (such literal, “Yass, queen!” brownnosing echoes Adin Ross sniffing Andrew Tate’s chair* without his consent and getting filmed for it [with Tate, ever the unironic Count Dracula, having installed his castle with cameras Ross probably didn’t know about, but in this case, the camera being their interview installation that Ross did know about]; i.e., Nazis continuing to dig their own graves, and which we—”enjoying” the little perks of journalism—look on in abject horror before camping them to death).

*Ariana Baio’s “Adin Ross Did Something Incredibly Gross to Andrew Tate after Chess Match” (2023).

[4] In the gender-neutral use of the term (of endearment), not the infantilizing classically misogynistic one.

[5] Akin to Robert Frost’s “All out of doors looked darkly in at him” from “An Old Man’s Winter Night” (1921).

[5a] Trigger warning: Discussions of survived sexual abuse. As my “token cis-het friend,” I’d like to outline Mira’s own thoughts and feelings on the Gothic and tokophobia. Their tokophobia was triggered by the stress of recently seeing a horror movie that involved rape, so they agreed to be interviewed for the book about it.

Mira’s own tokophobia is a hard limit—so intense, they actually used to experience pain after sex (“my body was rejecting what was happening”). However, since they started taking anxiety meds, it’s helped lessen the pain, but not the anticipation (what they call “injection” phobia—they hate needles, too). This, in turn, informs their thoughts on pregnancy as a disease*. In their opinion,

Babies are parasites by nature. They leech your energy, cause all sorts of problems as they grow bigger and bigger, and when it’s time for them to come out, it’ll be the wort pain you ever experience and there’s not much you can do about it. You can’t avoid it; it’s inevitable, excruciating trauma that your body will take months to recover from. I get the same smaller response with foreign objects. IUDs make me feel ill thinking about them, and so do menstrual cups and tampons. A condom came off inside me one time (thankfully empty); I nearly passed out when Gary [the alias for Mira’s partner] had to go fishing around inside me to get it out. Same idea with pelvic exams: I’d beat a nurse to death with a speculum if they go anywhere near a hole with it.

In other words, they explain, “Once this thing’s in you, it’s not coming out without a lot of extreme pain (the worst in your life) and people expect you to be happy about that; i.e., middle-aged women, who guilt-trip you into having kids, calling it [state-compelled sexual reproduction] a ‘blessing.'” This ties into Gothic modesty arguments as frequently morphological for cis-het women fearful of their biology (their uterus) as something normally controlled and regulated by state forces (the same way trans women are afraid of their penises).

*Mavis disagrees—would rather have house the baby (viable or not) even if it cost them their life, and confesses of their own volition that they would get raped to become pregnant if it was the only way they could conceive. It might sound strange, but rape fucks you up; i.e., rape as “fucking women up” in order to compel them to want to reproduce against their will. Mavis would rescue all babies (dead or alive) from the jaws of Hell; Mira would boot them unceremoniously like a football out a window and into a trashcan rigged with C4, detonating it with a smile on their face after quoting The Toxic Avenger (1984): “How much for a kid on a bicycle!”

To that, consider the shaming of a “modest-looking” woman like Rosemary from Rosemary’s Baby (1968) getting raped by the devil. Except in the 1967 novel, Rosemary cums from Satan’s big dick as immediately visually imposing like a knife might be, or a giant club; i.e., a delicate pale wallflower involuntarily cumming (the bodily response separate from their mental status) but cumming all the same to a big black dick as likened to a weapon leveled at a white women’s “portal” as “exit-only” for “dark forces.” However childish and cruel this might be, white men often project these bigoted anxieties onto white women as needing to “guard their virtue” for the sake of the bloodline’s “purity”: they belong to the husband to sire his children as “pure, uncorrupted.” This tracks; since Walpole, the Gothic chronotope is one of rape (the ghost of the counterfeit) tied to dynastic primacy and hereditary rites—of Lord Manfred chasing the heroine around the castle after he invokes a king’s “right” (to rape his wife) after his son (the original bridegroom) is crushed by a giant falling helmet. If that sounds campy as hell, it is; that’s generally the point of Gothic fiction. Such stories generally purvey and procure spaces of rape to safely play around with psychosexual trauma inside. Often, these are sacred in order to be profaned; i.e., a sacred female “temple” fouled by the defiler of a virginal church owned normally by a white man feeling insecure about his own penis (something—for those of us brave enough to actually face our fears—to poke fun at and play with, below).

(artist: Slugbox)

It’s not uncommon for such coded fears to point to personal childhood abuse. Except, in Mira’s case, they love horror media at large and weren’t sexually abused as a child. They actually acquired their tokophobic response due to trauma experienced at primary school; i.e., the teachers forcing them to learn unnecessarily about periods (after Mira had already experienced them at age nine), whereupon they underwent a vasovagal response (automatic fainting at the sight of blood, or things that can lead to blood—a knife or a needle, or something that resembles such a device: an erect penis). This event followed them into secondary school, whereupon sexual reproduction courses made them instantly feel faint (they passed the courses in question purely “by text,” meaning inside a controlled environment without unknown factors). For many rape victims, the trauma of the event supersedes the trauma of anticipation; i.e., getting “the stick” as something to fear versus it actually happening and someone regressing (whose disassociation can complicate trigger responses).

Faced with that, the anticipation of sex would make Mira tense up; i.e., their body but also their vagina—a hardwired mechanism called “vaginismus,” or

the body’s automatic reaction to the fear of some or all types of vaginal penetration. Whenever penetration is attempted, your vaginal muscles tighten up on their own. You have no control over it. Occasionally, you can get vaginismus even if you have previously enjoyed painless penetrative sex. Vaginismus does not necessarily affect your ability to get aroused and enjoy other types of sexual contact (source: NHS).

This either happened to the point that penetrative sex was impossible; or if they had PIV sex, they would hurt like hell afterwards—not from vaginal chaffing or stretching thanks to their partner’s big dick (they’re kind of a size queen) but from post-coital and post-orgasmic cramps.

Mira describes these as “a retroactive red flag”—akin to anxiety of a Neo-Gothic sort: rape phobias; i.e., the cum (and automatic fear mechanisms) literally associated with something dreadful to anticipate and fathom about after it’s been inside them. In their own words, there’s no risk of actual pregnancy from the sex (they always have sex with condoms and birth control pills), but the anxiety they feel (so-called “lizard brain”) is something that only lessened after they started taking medication for their mood (similar to HRT and trans people—brain chemicals affecting the body and mind in relation to external factors, including media). And even so, they can still get seriously triggered by the Pygmalion-esque torture-fest that is heteronormative cinema; i.e., echoes of sexist wackjobs like Hitchcock or Kubrick—men who loved torturing not just their female actors, but their audience members fearful of rapacious anticipation relative to familial locations: the household’s bathroom, bedroom, and kitchen as invaded by alien threats. During moral panic, such xenophobia easily extends to the audience in the theatre as afraid of a current moral panic. Normally this is likened to “scaring the panties off,” but can—in cases like Mira—backfire horribly.

In Mira’s case, they really don’t use BDSM to help ease these symptoms, then. For them, it’s a hard limit/pass to which they and their partner must respect until the symptoms, when triggered, pass. To that, their horniness and creative expression is generally separate from Gothic media as something to consume or express; i.e., monsters can be something to view as a threat and a safety device at the same time (e.g., me and mommy dominators topping me from above or below—or as a friend of mine confided in me: “I’d let a balrog fuck me”). Except, for Mira, this just isn’t the case. It isn’t despite them having been sexually assaulted as a teen by a teacher after class.

Mira’s story is as follows:

I had a friend, Autumn; the normal teacher was on maternity leave and a male supply [substitute] teacher was standing in. Because it was a mid-2000s lower-class secondary school, rumors of the supply teacher being gay followed him around—skinny jeans and “guyliner,” basically a dark academia twink. On our sixth or seventh lesson (which happened to be biology), Autumn—sitting next to me—ironically was the one to pass out, face-planting the desk. Turns out, her blood sugar was completely fucked (a hyperglycemic fit, according to the nurse). The teacher took everyone outside; afterwards, I was upset and crying alone with him, and while we were walking through the hall, he put his hand ’round my shoulder and squeezed my right breast… right as the superintendent was rounding the corner towards us. Needless to say, the supply teacher was fired.

Mira explains that they were already scared about Autumn, so it didn’t even register to them that they’d been assaulted until later that day. But to their credit, they didn’t let the experience color their view of queer people despite a—at the very least queer-appearing—sexual predator having taken advantage during a moment of weakness (sexual, for him; physical and emotional, for Mira). They didn’t go on, Posy-Parker-style, to ask cis men to invade women’s bathrooms with firearms and go looking for gay men in dresses; i.e., trans women. As such, Mira largely experiences sexual dysfunction relative to general anxiety and pain anticipation, not a particular sexual trauma or queer form of xenophobia (many of their friends, including this bitch right here, are gay as fuck).

Keeping that in mind, when they’re with their partner seeking mutual support, they don’t immediately jump to something sexual to make themselves feel better and, when they do, they don’t view their partner as a monster to fulfill a medicinal role (rape play), either. Instead, both they and Gary were close friends for all of secondary school. To that, Mira doesn’t even reflexively see Gary as “someone to have sex with,” but rather “spending time with their favorite person that may or may not lead to sex” (aw); i.e., big ace energy. Except, this is more due to anxiety, depression and their meds not working versus a congenital element (not defect, but neurodivergent condition: ace people aren’t diseases). Thanks to these factors, Mira exudes ace tendencies and a low sex drive, hence has no expectation of sex at all; stress makes their body “nope the fuck out” in ways my male body never could [stress causes erectile dysfunction in AMAB people, not cramps—this might be different with intersex people, of course]. By comparison, if I’m triggered, I need sex to get it out of my system (a purge response, Mira calls it; i.e., “some systems naturally respond by ejecting bad vibes, trauma, and [vis-à-vis the Gothic] rapacious forces; ‘report, purge, restart,'” Alien-style). Nymphomania isn’t unique to male bodies, but female bodies nevertheless remain sensitive to external stress as something that will variably cause vaginismus [and other symptoms; e.g., “spotting” or early periods] in a strictly animal, involuntarily sense; i.e., even without a history of acute and formative sexual abuse. It’s more annoying for Mira than actually scary—a painful case of “taco block.”

Things might seem discrete for Mira, then, and to some extent they are. But there is an element of crossover into their sex life, or at the least, something Mira and Gary must keep in mind: stress. Except, this includes their roles in the bedroom vis-à-vis Mira’s headspace relative to their biology as a cis-het woman. When Gary is subby and wants Mira to initiate, Mira has to put actual thought into it because it’s not something that comes naturally to them: Mira likes experiencing sex, but doesn’t initiate; they follow Gary’s lead (though when Mira gets dominant, Gary says they get “bite-y.” Mira calls it “involuntary nibbles”—to munch on Gary or control him while Mira rides his dick, no one knows). Gary is subby when he’s “had a bad week”; otherwise, he leads, and under those circumstances, Mira feels the physical and emotional impact of sex in an overtly sexual way. But due to their medically-induced dysfunction being regularly triggered by stress, they don’t jump at the chance to top or initiate (which would conflict with their anticipation anxiety/tokophobia). Meds help, but at the end of the day Mira follows Gary’s lead. To that, generally when Mira engages with horror media, the expectations are similar in that they don’t look for sex, but also feel that it wouldn’t be welcome if it parallels their traumatic experiences in school. They can’t “prep” themselves for it; it’s just reflexive and hardwired into them—a hard limit that can be triggered by calculated risk (and rape scenes shot in bad taste). But even so, Mira still doesn’t treat queer people like space aliens to shoot with a gun, or reduce to automatic, unwilling robotic slaves (for a master [or those accustomed to being treated like masters; i.e., cis-het men] to command, regardless of what: “pour me the tea, David”; “quack, damn you”; or “send nudes,” etc); their trauma is valid, but they have a healthy understanding of it, hence outlets, hence outlets, thus lots of queer friends. Mira is a good ally —as in, feminism without all the conditions you normally see from white cis-het women: “You’re human if you [meet these criteria, first]”; i.e., quid pro quo. And if you’re an ally without conditions, you might be a little gay yourself (a quality we look for when selecting our token straight friends).

[6] From her essay, “The Character in the Veil: Imagery of the Surface in the Gothic Novel” (1981).

[7] I.e., “the spectre of Rome” and other raiding factionalized forces; e.g. Christendom and Islam as patriarchal and monotheistic versus Pagan, matriarchal forms: spectres of Marx.

[8] Persephone van der Waard’s “Coming Out as Trans” (2022).